London so distinctly made by Nature to be
drained with little trouble. For there is
an almost uniform slope from north to
south, and west to east, from its highest
elevation of eighty-two feet above Trinity
high water-mark, on its northern border,
somewhere in Tottenham Court Road, to its
lowest, of fifty-three feet, on the southern
border, below Lincoln's Inn Fields. This
part of the town has nothing to do with the
malarious flats of Bermondsey and Lambeth,
but has right to some of the fresh breezes of
Highgate, Hampstead, and Saint Pancras.
Since Lincoln's Inn Fields and Russell Square
belong to the same sanitary district as the
courts of Monmouth Street, there are diversities
of wholesomeness no doubt; contrasts
which we shall find very well worth noting,
and defining, as we go on with the sketch.
But there are in that district, setting aside
mews, more than seventy streets, courts, and
alleys, in which there is no such thing as a
free entry of sunshine, or a current of air
passing through, close alembics for the
generation of a fever poison, courts with blind
endings, or lanes entered by passages
under houses. Nature's gift of good air is
thus disposed of. The gift of good soil and
water, again, is a blessing very nearly turned
into a curse. The porous gravel, where there
is little or no good artificial sewerage is
invaluable as a means of natural drainage,
The rains wash into it putrefying matter,
which, being thus diluted, filters through,
losing much of its noxious character, and
descends to the river, or to the large sewers
by which it may be intercepted. But, on the
clay bottoms under gravel, wells are formed
by the filtration downward of the water, till
it comes to the basin of stiff clay which holds
it. If the gravel be full of the refuse of
centuries, riddled with cesspools, leaky sewers
and gaspipes, with here and there thick
heaps of corpses in a churchyard that contains
the graves of generation after generation,
it is not pure water that filters through
the gravel, and through all these its contents.
Precisely because it is a good natural drain
for putrid things, it is a bad source from
which to draw the water that must run with;
them. The water that rises in the parish
well of Saint Giles's district is, in fact,
nothing more than highly diluted sewage. The
filth, no doubt, has undergone a great deal of
decomposition. Much of it is changed into
living plants and animalcules, nitric acid, and
other comparatively harmless things.

But there is a limit to this purifying
process, and no wise Londoner will swallow
water from a well formed on the top of the
bed of London clay. Dig through the clay, and
below it come to the deep water, bearing strata
into which flow the pure rains from gathering
grounds on wholesome country soil in
Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Drink and
enjoy the cool, pure water of those deep wells,
but in the water of the surface-wells suspect
the death that lurks. That caution no
Londoner should put out of his mind. In
Russell Square they have an Artesian well
sunk through the clay. The water of it
being tested, after standing four and twenty
hours in a warm room, was very bright and
clear, containing nothing alive, nothing
beyond a little flint and a few accidental fibres
of cotton.

Compare with this the clear water from
a surface-well in Bloomsbury Market. This
contains nitric acid and distinct traces of
iron. It teems with animal life. Paramæcia,
oxytricha, acineta, vorticella, and monads—to
drink this is like swallowing the Zoological
Gardens on a small scale—with amÅ“bæ,
confervæ, and sporules, and filaments of fungi,
decaying vegetable matter, dirt and flint.
We say nothing of the contents of dirty
tanks with inches of mud at the bottom.
The artificial water-supply of the whole
district is from the New River Company alone,
which furnishes a flat but decent fluid.

The sewerage of Saint Giles's, as a whole
district, is better than the average of London.
Between one and two hundred cesspools have
been abolished by the Board of Works, but
many still exist, and they are not much more
likely to be found below the dens of the
wretched, than under the mansions of the
polite tenants of Bloomsbury Square, upon
whose privacy the profane officer of health is
not yet strong enough to intrude, for want of a
sufficient emphasis of public support to justify
and back him in the absolute discharge of his
most important duty.

Now, let us ask how, as to its social state,
Saint Giles's stands in its relation to
surrounding districts, or to London at large. One
fact, to begin with, Doctor Buchanan puts
in the clearest possible form. Saint Giles's
covers one three-hundredth part of the area
of London, yet it contains seven three-
hundredths of the population. The men of Saint
Giles's, then, are pretty closely packed, eleven
or twelve to a house; two hundred and
twenty to an acre is the thickness of the
sickly-living crop there yielded to the bills of
mortality. For the town at large the
numbers are four to a house, and, considering the
parks and so forth, only thirty to an acre.
For the whole of the close central districts
nine or ten to a house, and about two hundred;
to an acre.

The houses, however, in the Strand and
Holborn districts form even a denser crowd
than that of the district of Saint Giles, which is
lightened by the large vacant spaces of
Lincoln's Inn Fields, Russell and other Squares.
But this fact is an essential one in the
consideration of Saint Giles's, that where the houses
are there is the crowding greater than in any
other of the central districts of the town. The
Strand district is little better, but it is better.

Saint Giles's, then, is beyond all surrounding
regions overcrowded with inhabitants. And
the next fact is, that of its inhabitants an